Tag: Theater Reviews

15 reviews from Orlando Fringe Winter Mini-Fest 2026

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Orlando Fringe’s Winter Mini-Fest is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a return to its original name (after briefly becoming FestN4) and location at the Lowndes Shakespeare Center. Here are reviews of 15 shows running now through Sunday, Jan. 11; visit orlandofringe.org/winterminifest for more information.

1 Small Lie: Martin Dockery

Sit back and relax, because master monologian Martin Dockery is back with another narrative journey that defies easy categorization in any genre and is essential Fringe viewing. As dramatically compelling as any true crime podcast and twice as funny, 1 Small Lie isn’t only an enthralling tall tale; it’s also a one-man technical tour de force. Surrounded by a stage full of softly glowing lamps, Dockery changes their colors with a swipe of his phone while simultaneously synchronizing his speech to match up perfectly with his constantly evolving soundtrack of pop songs and Badalamenti-esque atmospheric instrumentals. (Reviewed May 2025)

1 Small Lie: Martin Dockery tickets and information

Anatomica: A Comedy About Meat, Bones, & The Skin You’re In

Intimate audience participation improv intersects with an educational inquiry into endoskeletons’ advantages in Amica Hunter’s trippy, touching TED Talk about using performance art as an escape from physical pain. Anatomica is sometimes cute, sometimes cringey, and always extremely Fringey. (Reviewed in May 2023)

Anatomica: A Comedy About Meat, Bones, & The Skin You’re In tickets and information

The Best Man Show

Mark Vigeant’s dramatic drunken demonstration of what not to do at a wedding gets a ton of mileage out of the material before detouring into a delirious interpretive dance number. Vigeant may be the biggest disaster to hit wedding receptions since the Electric Slide, and I raise my flute of cheap champagne to him for sustaining the insanity as long as he manages. (Reviewed May 2025)

The Best Man Show tickets and information

Clymove X Rambüs

Longtime Fringegoers who fondly remember choreographer Mary Clymene from her days with Voci Dance will welcome her return to Central Florida’s stages after over a decade away, now accompanied by her own very own women-driven dance company and fellow Voci veteran Nigel John.

The first 20-odd-minute segment, 2024’s “Hips,” begins with a flesh-colored pile of tangled bodies and ASMR-style animal noises evoking the African savanna. Gracefully feline floor work, sensual and athletic, builds into breathtaking feats of balancing that elevate ordinary weight-sharing to acrobatic heights. Distorted dialogue delivers a paean to liberated femininity (“Feral fertile and fanged; she was never just the songbird, she was the vulture”) while lighting designer Conor Mulligan silhouettes the dancers’ diverse bodies into dramatic living sculptures.

After an informational intermission, during which Clymene informally answers audience questions while her performers change into eclectic patchwork dresses, the program concluded with 2025’s “Martha Always Said.” This slyly insightful peek behind the scenes of a dance company is inspired by the cattiness and comradery that complicates relationships between strong women, and features Josephine Brunnner — who looks and moves remarkably like Clymene did 20 years ago — trying to fit in among her competitive colleagues (JoVonna Parks, Khaila Espinoza, Samara Taylor, Arianna Stendardo).

Tying this all together is a thrilling musical soundtrack by Kurt Rambus, aka Orlando’s DJ Nigel John, who has now collaborated with Clymove on nine projects. Much more than a mere mixtape, Rambus blends ’70s funk and acid jazz with lo-fi beats and Afro-futurist drones into a darkly cinematic soundscape.

While many dance concerts are composed of brief pieces no longer than a pop song, it’s especially refreshing to see more substantial works with enough running time to develop and breathe. Like the acclaimed Alvin Ailey and Elisa Monte troupes that Clymene trained with, her Clymove is grounded in the roots of classic modern dance, and offers Orlando audiences a mouthwatering taste of Manhattan-quality movement.

Clymove X Rambüs tickets and information

Cracks

You may meet more than 80,000 people in your lifetime, but pay especially close attention when Claire Lochmueller says hello at the start of her blackly comedic autobiographical monologue, because what would be a simple introduction for anyone else is for her a declaration of identity decades in the making. Claire lived her first 30 years as a screaming voice trapped inside a cis-masculine shell named Matt. Catholic school confessions to bluenosed Benedictines and endless marching at military school did nothing to dispel Lochmueller’s gender dysphoria, a diagnosis that she struggled to accept despite experiencing debilitating depressive disassociation, which drove her into alcoholism.

Lochmueller’s Cracks crams humor within the horror stories — like her confession of teenage stolen valor, or the paranoid lengths she went to to purchase woman’s clothing — but her pain always lingers beneath the laughs, and her vivid evocation of a panic attack triggered one of the most visceral moments of empathy I’ve experienced at Fringe. The script’s timeline periodically becomes tangled in tangents, and I wish director David Resnick had slowed down some of the most intense moments in order to allow the emotions to land. However, Lochmueller’s contagious climactic euphoria upon embracing her true self after a lifetime of self-destructive denial makes this essential viewing, especially in an age when trans Americans are under assault.

Cracks tickets and information

The Event

The Event involves a man (David Calvitto, in a bravura marathon performance) standing alone onstage in front of an audience of mostly strangers, narrating his action — or utter lack thereof — in the third person for the better part of an hour. With the fleeting exception of a stagehand, whom he alternately extols and upbraids, nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful, and this drolly self-depreciating actor will be the first one to admit it, openly encouraging his audience to leave or at least fall asleep during his hypnotically professorial external monologue.

To say much too more about writer-director John Clancy’s witty satire on the theater and modern society might shatter the surreal spell that this hilariously heartbreaking show casts. It starts out like a one-man version of Waiting for Godot (minus the slapstick), then shifts into a Douglas Adams-esque sociological spoof (minus the sci-fi), before ending with a passionate plea regarding our primal need for personal communion, and a chilling rant on the collapse of collective memory.

The poetic script’s final fadeout doesn’t quite feel fully satisfying, and I’m still uncertain if a mid-show kerfuffle during the press preview was intentional or not — which may just be a testament to its ultra-meta nature. If you’re willing to take a chance on “some sort of art thing” and enjoy watching a fourth wall being not merely broken but butchered, this is one event worth RSVP’ing to.

The Event tickets and information

The Fabulous King James Bible

The Fabulous King James Bible makes incisive, insightful theological statements about the role of religion in controlling the population, saying the quiet part out loud about the corruption at the heart of the Church and State, but this Tudor tutoring is terrifically funny even if you aren’t a biblical history buff. Not to be missed for all the spilled tea in England. (Reviewed May 2025)

The Fabulous King James Bible tickets (sold out) and information

Funny Fortunes With Mercado de la Fortuna

Cuban-American comic Diane Jorge, who scored a huge hit with her improvised telenovelas at last May’s Orlando Fringe, returns with a takeoff of another beloved Spanish-language television tradition: Puerto Rican fortune teller Walter Mercado, the Latino Liberace of horoscopes. Jorge brings him back to life — bouffant hairpiece, red cape, and all — as Mercado de la Fortuna, a (legally distinct) loving spoof of the late psychic.

During an introductory autobiographical monologue, Jorge demonstrates the volcanic verbosity that made it hard for her to fit in with other children — except on Halloween — as pianist Ralph Krumins provides accompaniment on keyboards. The core of the show starts when she selects an audience member to sit at her table festooned with battery-powered tea lights and a crystal ball, where she divines their financial or romantic future with the aid of oversized Hispanic-themed tarot cards.

Jorge is like a real-life SNL sketch character, whether in or out of her Mercado guise, and although the accuracy of her predictions isn’t guaranteed, invasive questions leading to big belly laughs are. Even a master of “Si, y” improv would struggle to fill an hour with a handful of participants, so the press preview of Funny Fortunes didn’t reach the delirious heights of her last show, but Diane Jorge remains a must-see for Fringe’s fans of funny females.

Funny Fortunes with Mercado de la Fortuna tickets and information

The Goodlucks

Juanita Tyson (Tanya Neely) may be the biggest Black box office draw in Hollywood, but the prospect of her winning a prestigious Broadway acting award has her twisted in knots that even her publicist niece Lynn (Maa Bruce-Amanquah) can’t untangle. Making matters worse, her co-star and spouse, Bert Goodluck (McDaniel Austin), is an unlikeable man-baby whose envy of her success is even more embarrassing than his hairpiece. If August Wilson had created a wacky three-camera sitcom pilot — complete with a saucy daughter (Alma Ramirez) and goofy best friend (Jataun Gilbert) — it might have looked a lot like The Goodlucks.

Writer-director Ma’at Atkins received acclaim at the Hollywood Fringe for this family dramedy, which pays tribute to pioneering performers like Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee and Hattie McDaniel, while acknowledging the considerable barriers that African American artists continue to face. However, I fear something might have been lost in transit to Orlando, because I found the play’s central question “will famous rich folks get even richer?” dramatically uncompelling.

Neely gives her overwrought actress character an appropriate flair for florid gestures, while still finding moments of quiet intensity in which to lower her facade; but among the rest of the cast, only the easy-going Gilbert manages to make his dense dialogue sound like something that would come out of a human being’s mouth. Technical elements are distractingly DIY, cue pickup is inconsistent, and the staging is stiffly two-dimensional, with front-facing actors often barely making side-eye contact.

The Goodlucks offers some important observations about race and misogyny in the entertainment industry, and features a fierce female lead, but its shallow supporting characters and too-convenient conclusion ultimately undermine its admirable intent.

The Goodlucks tickets and information

Jon Bennett: This Will Only Ever Happen Once

Fringe Festival favorite Jon Bennett — the Australian Outback’s most entertaining export since Steve Irwin got stingrayed — is back in Orlando with a brand-new comic monologue tracing the connection between his two lifelong obsessions: performing on stage and spotting animals in nature. This Will Only Ever Happen Once is an autobiographical shaggy-dog story that rambles breathlessly through traumatic talent shows, Borneo jungle safaris and David Attenborough dance parties. A sensitive child bullied by his siblings, Bennett relates a hysterical menagerie of memorable mammal-related mishaps — including encounters with humpback whales, wild orangutans and a bloated cow corpse — that might be too absurd to believe, if they weren’t accompanied by his fast-paced slideshow of family photos and childhood drawings proving their provenance.

Bennett performed this version of his latest script, which was split nearly in half from an earlier draft, for the first time at a press preview mere hours after stepping off a red-eye flight. So it’s understandable if the show’s dramatic shape — which includes an abrupt ending, followed by an offhand yet essential epilogue — could still stand some development. But for a comedian best known for pretending things are a cock, Bennett’s latest verbal adventure is not merely as charmingly chaotic as a cat video; his animal-inspired epiphanies about the ineffable pleasure of irreproducible experiences prove unexpectedly moving.

Jon Bennett: This Will Only Ever Happen Once tickets and information

Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval

Based on the 1986 computer game by Rob Swigart (not the better known Valve game featuring GladOS), Portal is an ambitious intellectual sci-fi drama set a century from now, when civilization has been driven underground by the ravages of neurophagic wars. Mathematical genius Petra Devore (Katherine Stevens), and her pasta-obsessed sibling, Larin (Rhys Rose, providing welcome comic relief), race against time to transition humanity into a higher state of being, while mustache-twirling meanies (Chuck Dent and Jac LeDoux) try to maintain the fascist status quo.

In whittling down an entire streaming series’ worth of world-building into one fast-moving hour, writer-director David Strauss has crafted a metaphor-laden script that combines the abstract cosmology of 2001’s Space Child finale with the head-scratching technobabble of TNG-era Star Trek. Even if you arrive early for the preshow slideshow of expository info-dumping, the dialogue’s dense deluge of unfamiliar acronyms may leave you feeling lost in space. The narrative logic — where a lone protagonist can save the world by solving puzzles — is straight out of a vintage 8-bit text adventure, and the self-serious high-stakes tone tends towards ’70s British TV shows like The Tomorrow People.

However, this all-star cast of PRT stalwarts — especially the magnetically self-assured Stevens, and McKenzie Pollock as her manic pixie cryosleep dream-girl — exhibits enough emotional investment for me to accept (if not entirely understand) the perplexing plot twists. Memorable minor roles include Rob Del Medico as a wounded veteran with a Dory-sized attention span and Nikki Darden as an Antarctic anarchist with an inexplicable mid-Atlantic accent. For thoughtful fans of hardcore philosophical science fiction who are willing to suspend their disbelief into the exosphere, this Portal takes the cake.

Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval tickets and information

Private Parts: The Secrets We Keep

Fringegoers who adored writer-performer Joanna Rannelli’s Critics’ Choice award-winning hairstyling comedy Bangs, Bobs & Banter should secure their ’dos before seeing Private Parts: The Secrets We Keep, because although this often-funny one-woman showcase has the propulsive energy of a stand-up set, Rannelli’s autobiographical expose is so searingly raw it deserves a trigger warning. She starts out on a light note, dancing to “Eye of the Tiger” in a wedding veil as she confesses to a secret marriage — followed by a secret divorce — to an international acrobat. Hold on tight, because her roller coaster of emotion-packed storytelling only accelerates from there, as she traces how her alcoholic mother’s legacy of shameful secrets turned her into a bed-soiling 7-year-old with a cigarette habit.

Director Kerry Ipema expertly shapes the pace of this potentially punishing piece, wisely modulating the volume and employing efficient lighting shifts to break up the barrage of bad memories. But it’s Rannelli’s own willingness to dig into her hidden past and expose her most private persona that makes this must-see monologue such a powerfully moving experience.
I could quibble that the uplifting ending, which comes hot on the heels of devastating revelations involving abuse and infertility, seems somewhat glib. But if someone like Rannelli, who spends life “torn between things I want to know and the fear of finding out” can bravely share her darkest truths, it gives hope that those of us who have endured far less can also find forgiveness for ourselves and others.

Private Parts: The Secrets We Keep tickets and information

The Rooms We Carry

Central Florida theatergoers are accustomed to consuming dance performances that are either entirely abstract or serve to spell out a straightforward plot, and almost always have all their rough edges smoothed off. But if there is an audience hungry for an impressionistic journey through experimental improvisation, they can find much-needed nourishment in The Rooms We Carry, an emotionally charged contemporary movement exercise from Quantum Leap Productions.

Michelina Moen and Cristina Ramos — the show’s primary performers and co-directors — are both compelling dancers who can transform simple pedestrian movements into impactful gestures. Moen, a longtime favorite from VarieTease, manages to beautifully balance both muscularity and vulnerability; Ramos is simultaneously sinuous and sinewy, especially during a vibrant salsa number. Amid symbolic props like photographs, phonographs and vintage furniture, the pair take turns improvising angst-imbued solos that evoke powerful feelings of regret, release and renewal, without relying on a literal storyline.

Moen and Ramos are accompanied onstage by technical designer Kylee Taylor, who employs handheld projectors, flashlights and color-changing LED bulbs to conjure some striking stage images. Unfortunately, Taylor’s innovative illumination techniques too often obscure the artists while blinding the audience, and her presence sometimes pulls focus from the dancers. Similarly, the soundtrack of pop songs — from Billie Eilish and Hayley Williams to David Bowie and Childish Gambino — is smartly curated (save for a saccharine Phil Collins finale), but is undercut by several jarring audio edits.

The Rooms We Carry is a show that demands patience from its viewers, presenting more of a loose collection of intriguing concepts than a fully fleshed-out creation. I can’t help wishing that more of the running time was devoted to ensemble moments integrating these skilled performers, and a little less to deep breathing and shuffling setpieces. However, I’m optimistic that this talented trio can polish this project into a more consistent package before embarking on their upcoming tour of Canadian fringe festivals without rubbing away all its fascinating personal facets.

The Rooms We Carry tickets and information

Softie

Wearing wire-frame glasses and a knitted cap on his balding head, writer-performer Tim Felton isn’t exactly bringing sexy back, but this milquetoast Midwestern househusband might just be bringing “mildly attractive middle-age” back with his inexplicable solo comedy, Softie. Tim loooooves getting to know new people, and is prone to schmoozing shamelessly with anyone and everyone, from audience members to his own booth technician. With romantic guitar strumming underscoring every attempted meet-cute, he individually welcomes every attendee while using the word “magic” more often than Vin Diesel says “family.”

Felton compares his quirky persona to Mr. Rogers, Pee-wee Herman and Buster Bluth, but his malapropistic wordplay and narcissistic naiveté remind me more of Arrested Development’s Tobias Funke. His slow-burn warmup features fantastically fearless crowd work, as the irritatingly ingratiating character gradually charms us with his innocent urge to make connections. And by the time Felton’s show culminates in an audience-participation Spin the Bottle party (in which I was gratefully unable to participate) he’s made a strong case that more platonic physical contact among adults might result in a healthier society.

However, about 20 minutes into this oddly endearing encounter group, there’s a violent vibe shift as Felton snaps into salacious stand-up mode, shattering the previously established mood with aggressively profane pubescent rants about emo music, intercourse with his “cool Christian” spouse and his deficit of spontaneous erections. If Felton could just take out the unnecessary 10 minutes of F-bombs and penis-shaped balloons — without altering the weirdly charming Napoleon Dynamite-meets-Emo Philips elements of his creation — then this surreally silly yet somehow moving show would move up from a soft suggestion to a hard recommendation.

Softie tickets and information

Vampira: A Hollywood Horror Story

Few of them know it, but every black-glad goth hanging around a Hot Topic owes a debt to Maila Nurmi — aka Vampira — the pioneering television horror hostess who became a cautionary tale during the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age. She finally gets her due in writer-performer Ingrid Garner’s ghoulishly good one-woman show, in which she fully inhabits the wasp-waisted Plan 9 From Outer Space star’s iconic persona (which was shamelessly appropriated years later by Elvira).

The child of a temperance preacher and an alcoholic, Nurmi “never caught the gist of being human.” Fleeing her unhappy home for Hollywood, she was befriended by Orson Welles, Marlon Brando and James Dean (among other up-and-coming A-listers) before becoming a short-lived sensation in her own right. Garner isn’t merely a name-dropper, because Nurmi made a measurable impact on these legendary men’s lives, even though she’s largely been overlooked.

Despite that erasure, the subversive impact of Vampira’s mesmerizingly morbid sensuality on repressed Eisenhower-era Americans continues to echo today in punk music and fashion. Garner’s gossip-packed, tightly paced theatrical tribute to Nurmi is informative and entertaining, but also deeply emotional at points; I only wish a shocking 11th-hour twist was revealed earlier to address its implications. Vampira’s reputation is long overdue for a resurrection, and Garner’s inspirational interpretation of this iconoclast against mid-century domesticity will make you want to go out and “terrorize normalcy” yourself.

Vampira: A Hollywood Horror Story tickets and information

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Seth Kubersky
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January 9, 2026
Old French Bores: Molière Is Blasphemed in This Tin-Eared ‘Tartuffe’

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Matthew Broderick and David Cross. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

One is tempted to execute a stunt review of the new Tartuffe in heroic couplets, as the late, great Richard Wilbur translated Molière’s comedies for six decades, beginning with The Misanthrope in 1955. For example, I could open with:

This shoddy Tartuffe with its lazy rhymes

Is a cracked church bell that gratingly chimes.

But I won’t subject you to my doggerel; I had to choke down so much already at New York Theatre Workshop. Lucas Hnath’s version of the 1669 French classic adopts a defiantly dopey attitude to the original Alexandrine verse, spitting out countless false rhymes (special/medal), pointless recycling (bastard/disaster—twice!) and triplets that seem to relish their own insipidity (“to touch your ass is no more crass than worshipping at holy mass”). Wilbur opted for a sleek line of iambic pentameter, and his bouncy euphony, highly playable and delightful on the ear, remains the gold standard. Hnath’s effort, by contrast, is a collegiate prank, a hectic hash of profanity, stoner chuckles and feints at moral philosophy. He seems unconcerned if his rhyming falls flat or his characters sound like idiots. The outraged matriarch Mme Pernelle (Bianca del Rio, haute camp) lambastes her relatives for being louche and uncouth:

I am stunned you think it’s okay that the cleaning woman has so much say, be that as it may,
go ahead and let the maid just have her way, I can no longer stay and watch you all fall into
moral decay.

I’m not cosplaying rhyme police; this is cheap stuff. Once you hear Hnath’s weakness for flat or tinny notes, you can’t un-hear it, and it will bug you for two hours sans intermission. For some reason, he formats his script in prose, as if to bury the juvenile wordplay.

What a misguided affair from such an accomplished team. Director Sarah Benson has collaborated intensely with living or modern playwrights (her productions of An Octoroon, Fairview, and Blasted were unforgettable) but sinks under the weight of a hyper-stylized design and resolutely unfunny text. Hnath has been justly celebrated for form-bending in weird, metatheatrical dazzlers such as Dana H. and A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney (which Benson staged at Soho Rep). It’s unclear what the goal was here. Drunk Theatre does French Baroque? Hip-hop Molière without actual rapping?

Amber Gray. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

Tartuffe is a clockwork farce about the hypocrisy of moralizers and the credulity of followers. Wealthy patriarch Orgon (David Cross) has fallen under the spell of Tartuffe (Matthew Broderick), a nondenominational preacher who espouses a vaguely Catholic credo of sexual abstinence and mortification of the flesh. Naturally, this doesn’t prevent Tartuffe from gorging on Orgon’s larder or lusting after his attractive wife, Elmire (Amber Gray, glamour and grace). Orgon’s son, Damis (Ryan J. Haddad, petulant delight) sees through the hypocrite—as does mouthy maid Dorine (Lisa Kron) and mousy daughter Mariane (Emily Davis). Perpetually posing with a frozen smile and singsong delivery, Ikechukwu Ufomadu pops in now and then as Mariane’s nincompoop suitor Valère. There’s a tasting menu of acting styles clashing onstage, but Ufomadu really seemed to be in his own play. I kinda wish I’d been at that one.

To be sure, it’s a murderer’s row of gifted actors, and David Cross (Arrested Development) cannot not get laughs playing a confident dolt. Davis simpers and grimaces deliciously as Orgon tries to arrange a marriage between her and Tartuffe, and Haddad throws very amusing tantrums. Kron seems baffled by the world around her, but manages dry one-liners. As Elmire’s brother and a voice of reason, Francis Jue may not have the flashiest role, but he finds a pleasing balance of witty restraint and outrage. About Matthew Broderick, I don’t know what to say. After seeing umpteenth performances from him on Broadway and Off-Broadway, I’m still shocked by his limited range and strangulated physical vocabulary. His Tartuffe talks (and walks) like Kermit the Frog in a frock coat. His understated squeaks render some lines droll, but on the whole, Broderick recedes into the muted green walls (mock-Louis XIV furnishings by set collective dots).

Emily Davis and Ikechukwu Ufomadu. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

Benson and her designers deserve credit for not setting Tartuffe in a modern-day megachurch or MAGA country. Her actors are arranged in a hermetically sealed, cartoon version of 17th-century France, with sumptuous costuming by Enver Chakartash so colorful and candied it’s like a crate of macarons on legs. Sound design by Peter Mills Weiss mixes boxing-match bells and industrial droning, and interstitial dances by Raja Feather Kelly gesture (superfluously) toward the characters’ lives of leisure, like mimed ballroom dancing and tennis. Heather Christian contributes a dirge at the end that seems to point out everyone is guilty of moral certitude, which kills the already decomposing satirical vibe.

Look, finding comic gold in Molière is famously hard. The antique Gallic humor is refined and mannered, the Wilbur translations, as mentioned, are hard to beat, and the structured nature of the farce needs a super-deft, well-directed group of clowns to keep it popping. This past summer, Red Bull Theater’s The Imaginary Invalid actually worked. Adapter Jeffrey Hatcher opted for a prose translation that went straight for the funny bone. It was all there: visual gags, silly accents, runaway mugging, jokes about Les Misérables. Punch lines that punched. At New York Theatre Workshop, it’s style without substance—which Molière mocked in the first place.

Tartuffe | 2 hrs. No intermission. | New York Theatre Workshop | 79 East 4th Street | 212-460-5475 | Click Here For Tickets

Lisa Kron and Emilty Davis. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

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David Cote

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December 19, 2025
Review: Forbidden Broadway Mercilessly Mauls the Hits

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Jenny Lee Stern and Danny Hayward in Forbidden Broadway. Carol Rosegg

When I was a callow theater kid, I hated musicals: it was a bastard genre, inferior to the classics and modern drama. To be honest, I didn’t know any musicals, so my distaste was based on ignorance and secondhand derision—cartoons and spoofs. A Broadway-besotted college chum took pity and made me a Stephen Sondheim mixtape. He included (along with tracks from Merrily, George, Sweeney, et cetera) “Into the Words” from Forbidden Broadway: Volume 2 (1991). The piss-taking ditty lampooned the density and complexity of Sondheim’s lyrics to the tune of the “Prologue” from Into the Woods: “Into the words / That fly and try to make you / Choke the joke you’ve sung / Into the words / More letters than / They sell on Wheel of Fortune.” Somehow, this mockery increased my admiration even more.

Decades after my classmate enlightened me, I’m the polar opposite of a musical-phobic youth: I have many opinions about Broadway shows. Especially recent ones—which take a jolly beating in Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song, the new batch of sung spoofs and malicious medleys by Gerard Alessandrini. The master satirist’s long-lived revue is 42 years old and a cottage industry (with national tours and multiple albums). He and his cast of wildly talented mimics took a long, hard look at the 2023–24 season and said, “Phooey!” To get the gags, is it essential to have suffered through—I mean, sat through—song-and-dance spectacles of past years? Not really. Idly browsing social media you probably learned that Eddie Redmayne’s Emcee from the Cabaret revival was divisive, to say the least.

Nicole Vanessa Ortiz, Danny Hayward and Chris Collins-Pisano (from left) in Forbidden Broadway. Carol Rosegg

To say the most (and Alessandrini does), the twitchy Brit stank. As droll accompanist Fred Barton plunks out the Kurt Weill–y vamp from “Wilkommen,” Danny Hayward enters in classic Joel Grey-as-Emcee drag, taking us on a tour of the role: camped up by Alan Cumming in the ’90s then clowned into garish nonsense by Redmayne. Hayward morphs between his nested impersonations with the help of Dustin Cross’s ingenious tear-away costumes. Jenny Lee Stern joins the savaging as a demented Gayle Rankin who shrieks her way through Sally Bowles’s titular tune: “What good is playing this role the ol’ way / Liza was just o.k.! / Come see my dark deranged display / Come drag my painted corpse away / When I murder Cabaret!”

Later, the formidable Stern appears in a sendup of “The Ladies Who Lunch” (Company was a couple of seasons back, but who’s counting). Stern delivers a pitchy-perfect version of Patti LuPone’s consonant-melting, lyric-chewing, melismatic snarl. Nicole Vanessa Ortiz likewise has fun reproducing Audra McDonald’s opera-meets-Broadway soprano in a melodramatic take on “Rose’s Turn,” as the six-time Tony winner shudders before the ghost of Ethel Merman. (Audra’s Gypsy opens in December.)

Danny Hayward and Chris Collins-Pisano in Forbidden Broadway. Carol Rosegg

Everybody comes in for a spanking, even straight plays. The impish Chris Collins-Pisano dons brunette pigtails as Cole Escola urging us to “attend the tale of Mary Todd.” Continuing the women-in-politics theme, Stern pops up as Shaina Taub (pronounced “Tobb,” for a nearer rhyme) heralded as “the Lin-Manuel of New Broadway.” Although grumbling that Broadway musicals are vulgar, derivative, and phony is like complaining that action movies contain violence, Alessandrini has standards and he’s not afraid to uphold them, with a wink. Ben Platt is a narcissistic warbler. Hell’s Kitchen is ersatz self-mythologizing. Lincoln Center is full of snobs. Merrily We Roll Along recouped only because of “Harry Potter, Inc.” One of the best extended gags involves Back to the Future’s Marty McFly (Hayward) and Doc Brown (Collins-Pisano) time-warping to 1945 (in search of musicals that were artful and affordable), and accidentally derailing the artistic development of 15-year-old Stephen Sondheim. Dazzled by Doc’s space-age DeLorean, Sondheim grows up to be a car designer, meaning that Broadway in the 23rd century is an AI wasteland of robots and reboots and celebrity branding (a video backdrop of the future Great White Way includes a marquis for the Sean Hayes Theatre.)

Forbidden Broadway is a goof, but a virtuosic and stylish one, with infectious comic verve and lyrics that range from wittily inspired to boldly dumb (rhyming “earplugs” with “queer drugs”). It’s Mad Magazine with jazz hands; Saturday Night Live with people who can actually sing and dance; the antidote to hate watching; and a much-needed immunization for the season.

Forbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song | 1hr 30mins. No intermission. | Theatre 555 | 555 West 42nd Street | 646-410-2277 | Buy Tickets Here

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David Cote

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September 20, 2024
Review: Women’s Work Is A Bloody Business In ‘The Welkin’

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Sandra Oh (center) and the company of The Welkin. Ahron R. Foster

It’s unscientific and unverifiable, but I have a theory that a lot of shabby British playwriting is smoothed over by dazzling British acting. No, I’m not pushing the snobby lie that English actors are just, y’know, better. Their training does generally make them text-forward and apt for verbally dense, rhetorically twisty material. Take Peter Morgan’s Patriots, now on Broadway starring a hard-working Michael Stuhlbarg. I saw it last summer in London, where the magnificent Tom Hollander chewed the scenery with ravenous aplomb. Too bad that said verbal scenery was provided by the schematic and trope-drunk hack behind The Crown.

This preamble is not to imply that Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin is shabby. She’s a courageous writer digging into pre-modern feminism and the moral rot of misogyny in visceral, startling ways. And I’m in no way suggesting the mostly American cast of the New York premiere is inferior; they’re a head-turning group of sixteen pros. There’s simply a lag between the very specific English setting (1759, East Anglia) and the non-accented vocal approach that director Sarah Benson has—no doubt carefully—taken. Except for an Australian twang here (Nadia Malouf) and a Scots brogue there (original UK cast member Tilly Botsford), the actors speak sans affectation regardless of class. (Exception: Mary McCann plays a posh dame with a hidden past.) There is an admirable goal of transparency behind this choice. Kirkwood herself encourages diversity wherever the work’s presented, and a scrupulous recreation of rural Georgian England might muddy the political topicality of The Welkin: the sequestering of women from agency, from knowledge of their bodies, from justice.

Dale Soules, Emily Cass McDonnell, Sandra Oh, Jennifer Nikki Kidwell, Tilly Botsford, Susannah Perkins (kneeling), Haley Wong, Paige Gilbert, Simone Recasner and Nadine Malouf (from left) in The Welkin. Ahron R. Foster

Even so, the cadences of Kirkwood’s densely populated and overplotted drama seem off in this Atlantic Theater Company production. The author sprinkles her dialogue with antique regional idioms—mardle for gossip; bunter, slamkin, drag, all variations on a vulgar, low woman—which are colorful if distracting. (Could use a glossary in the program.) Our putative hero, proto-feminist midwife, Lizzy Lake (Sandra Oh), is prone to vehement, eloquent speeches that call to mind George Bernard Shaw stumping for suffragettes. Between the olde English slang and the soapbox diatribes, you imagine the text sprouting more fully in its native soil. Despite it all, once your ear adjusts to the anachronistic filter, it is possible to settle into the admittedly juicy plot.

A horrible crime has occurred in a village. Ann Wax, the young daughter of a well-to-do family, was murdered and dismembered. Alleged perpetrators are quickly apprehended: a Scottish vagabond named Thomas McKay—summarily hanged—and his accomplice, 21-year-old Sally Poppy (Haley Wong), who appears to her husband (Danny Wolohan) crazed, covered in blood and burning a lock of Ann Wax’s hair in the candle. The action of the play proper begins when Lizzy and 11 other women are called to the court for a special duty: to determine is Sally is, as she claims, pregnant. The accused killer has “pled the belly,” and if found pregnant will be transported to America rather than executed.

Haley Wong, Dale Soules and Susannah Perkins (from left) in The Welkin. Ahron R. Foster

Ten minutes or so of back story gets us to the meat of The Welkin: a dozen women locked in a stifling room with the viciously angry, unrepentant Sally, the silent bailiff Coombes (Glenn Fitzgerald), and townspeople outside the window baying for blood. The “jury of matrons” must vote unanimously yea or nay. Whether or not the girl is with child, Lizzy wants her freed. As she tells Coombes (her lover):

I know she has been tried in a cold room by cold men on the word of a cold husband, with no-one to speak for her and a mob outside the window. Even if she is lying I do not blame her, I would lie too. When a woman is being buried alive, she will reach for even the grubbiest tool to dig herself out again.

Act I is concerned with finding evidence that “she be quick with child,” even if most of the ladies think Sally’s shamming and want her hanged so they can get back to their daily drudgery. The grim and unspeaking Sarah Hollis (Hannah Cabell) palpates Sally’s breasts for milk, while others banter about their own pregnancies and share tips on sex and menstruation, when not mocking the buffoonish Coombes to his face.

Among the genres boldly blended in The Welkin (which naturally evokes Twelve Angry Men and the recent movie Women Talking) it’s a murder mystery that flips into a birth mystery. Is Sally preggers, and is her origin obscurely linked to Lizzy? It’s also a shockingly detailed survey of female life in 18th century England, which obviously (and nauseatingly) resonates today. Their humanity is subsumed in domestic slavery and incessant breeding, their access to healthcare and reproductive services rigidly controlled by men and theology. That we’re still debating these gender inequities and hateful laws is an index of social barbarity. Kirkwood also dips into the folk-horror well when Cabell (spellbinding, as always) breaks years of muteness to tell a story about the Devil and childbirth. The title is an ancient word for the sky—across which Halley’s Comet passes that March day, a spectacular reminder that cosmic and social cycles remain fixed.

In terms of subtleness of structure, The Welkin has its problems. That comet does a lot of heavy metaphorical lifting, and Kirkwood spoon-feeds the audience theme toward the end. She introduces Act II plot twists that border on ridiculous. Even so, Benson’s sturdy, propulsive staging supports a stage full of obscenely gifted performers. The heartbreaking Emily Cass McDonnell’s depressed, childless Helen turns bitterly on her sisters. Susannah Perkins, an intense, elvish redhead, seems to vibrate between genders as a tomboyish (yet pregnant) farmer wife. Frisky and wry Paige Gilbert lights up her bits with saucy irreverence. Wong’s wolfish, self-annihilating Sally delivers a harrowing vision and confession. And Oh blazes equally hot in Lizzy’s witty, indignant speechifying and the depths of maternal horror into which she finally plunges. Kirkwood takes big, violent, not fully satisfying swings, but one must bow before her women. Even though this ensemble can’t “save” the play, I was grateful to witness both. Will it take another 75 years for such a cluster of talent to burn across the heavens? Keep looking up.

The Welkin | 2hrs 30mins. One intermission. | Atlantic Theater Company | 330 West 20th Street | 646-328-9579 | Buy Tickets Here

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David Cote

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June 12, 2024
Review: Pandemic Meltdown Musical ‘Three Houses’ Finds Song in Solitude

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J.D Mollison, Margo Seibert, and Mia Pak in Three Houses. Marc J. Franklin

Hey, what’d you do for the pandemic? Sorry to be so 2022, but the topic’s hard to avoid regarding Dave Malloy’s Three Houses, currently running at the Signature Theatre. We certainly know what Malloy did: He wrote a musical triptych about Covid Times. Or rather, about three people losing their minds from isolation and introspection during lockdown in Latvia, Taos, and Brooklyn, and how they’re redeemed through connection in song.

Three Houses is a sort of companion piece to Malloy’s previous Signature outing (in the same space, too: the roomy and flexible Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre). Internet addiction was the theme in 2019’s Octet, set in a church basement redolent of AA meetings, but which really served as a metaphorical space for purging sins. Each of the eight characters in Octet got a number explaining how being Extremely Online derailed their lives. It ended, as Three Houses does, with a gently hopeful move towards peace. Where the earlier show was a cappella, Three Houses has a small but colorful ensemble of piano, organ, strings, and French horn (plus electronics). Malloy has also scaled down the number of protagonists.

Which invites us to do the math. Octet covered eight stories in 100 minutes. Three Houses rolls out a trio of tales in about the same time. An average of 12 minutes per character previously, 33 in the current one. I wish I could say that half an hour spent with Susan, Sadie, and Beckett over two continents was thoroughly engrossing. But there’s a draggy sameness to their quarantine journeys—reinforced by recurring plot details—that grows repetitive rather than resonant. Each narrative follows a pattern: post-romantic breakup, a person retreats to a temporary space during lockdown, goes nuts from loneliness, self-medicates, reconnects spiritually with grandparents and, bruised but wiser, recovers their senses. As an extra intertextual layer, the whole affair references “The Three Little Pigs,” with a bearded hipster bartender (Scott Strangland) standing in for the Big Bad Wolf. I’m not sure whether you’d call Three Houses a fable retconned as a covid parable, or a covid parable trapped inside a fable. Either way, it comes across as putting a hat on a hat.

Mia Pak and Margo Seibert in Three Houses. Marc J. Franklin

Anyway, let’s meet our appealing, young Pandy pilgrims. Newly single novelist Susan (Margo Seibert) flees to her grandmother’s house in the Latvian countryside. There, she delights in solitude, organizing granny’s sprawling library, smoking weed and getting lit on red currant wine. However, weeks of dissipation and self-loathing take their toll, and there’s an inevitable emotional collapse. Sadie (Mia Pak) decamps for her aunt’s ranch house in Taos and, not content with that escape from reality, retreats further into a Sims-like video game, building a replica of her grandparents’ house in Ohio. Sadie hits rock bottom spending 14 hours a day in her digital utopia. Beckett (J.D. Mollison) waits out the virus in a basement apartment, filling it with dozens of Amazon delivery boxes that symbolize his primary connection to the outside. Beckett also boozes (his Irish grandfather’s favorite plum brandy), hallucinates a giant, talking spider, and generally loses his marbles.

Resourceful and witty director Anne Tippe stages these echoing odysseys in a handsome lounge bar designed by the collective dots, noirishly lit by Christopher Bowser. It’s karaoke night, and each person steps up to the microphone, like a latter-day plague exile in the Decameron, to relate their experience. Downtown theater icons Ching Valdes-Aran and Henry Stram hover on the periphery as enigmatic waiters who take on supporting roles as grandparents. Further variation from the sung-through monologues comes in the form of a trio of amusing puppets designed by the marvelous James Ortiz: a cutesy, Elmo-sounding Dragon (voiced by Pak); a gung-ho anime badger (Mollison); and a sexy English arachnid nicknamed Shelob (Seibert).

Mia Pak in Three Houses. Marc J. Franklin

Lurking behind each narrator at the mic, the bartender signals their karaoke coda by blowing cigarette smoke into the spotlight. You know, huffing and puffing and blowing their you-know-whats down. By the end of the night, Strangland has donned a wolf’s head and grandmother’s nightgown (blurring Little Red and Little Pigs), and our cathartically healed heroes are encouraged to dance with the beast. The message: the monster is going to blow your house down anyway, so make peace with it. And: connect with strangers. Also: Your grandparents’ trauma explains your trauma. Mileage will vary on how hard such sentiments hit.

As with all Malloy projects (the apex of which is Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812), his score is entertainingly eclectic: pseudo-Baltic reels, electronica, and a plangent, earthly melding of folk and indie rock. Borrowing from baroque pop and musical theater, Malloy’s work achieves a sound world compositionally more complex than 99% of what’s on Broadway—yet engaging, due his literate humor and obvious love of popular idioms. Two numbers particularly stood out for me. In “Haze,” we get the perfect ballad for the walking wounded when Sadie sings, “My heart broke / And then the world broke / And then my brain broke too.” Later, Beckett shares a bitter insight in “Love Always Leaves You in the End.” Too often though, one sits through fussy, prosy verbiage that doesn’t sing so great, following a quirky story whose arc you can already predict. This is no knock on the nimble and charming Seibert, Pak, and Mollison, who do sterling service with hectic, challenging material.

Malloy (juggling book, music, lyrics, and orchestrations) produces lovely passages, but dramatic tension and character development is where Three Houses starts to wobble on its foundations and devolves into an allegorical anthology with diminishing returns. Narration and description take up so much text, the action stalls in passive self-regard. Alternating speaking and singing might have been a wiser tactic or tightening each episode by ten minutes. For a writer inspired by loneliness, Molloy should seek out creative company: a book writer, for example, who could help shape his prodigious musical imagination, and push back when he blows too hard.

Three Houses | 1hr 45mins. No intermission. | Pershing Square Signature Center | 480 West 42nd Street | 212-244-7529 | Buy Tickets Here

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David Cote

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May 20, 2024
Review: Flashy and Fake ‘Great Gatsby’ Caps a Weak Season

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Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada in The Great Gatsby Evan Zimmerman

There’s something almost quaint about The Great Gatsby’s arrival at the end of a crowded Broadway season (11 new musicals and revivals bowed in the past six weeks). This splashy transfer from New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse assumes a market hungry for a semi-faithful adaptation of F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel about second lives and broken dreams. Perhaps producers regarded Six and & Juliet as proof of concept: take a literary source or historical footnote, pump it up with dance tunes and quasi-feminism, and rake in the cash. But those shows brazenly deconstruct and dumb down their content for the TikTok–addled hordes; Gatsby, on the other hand, clings to a shred of dignity until, like its title fraudster, it flops into a pool with a bullet in the back.

Don’t misunderstand me: The Great Gatsby is not a smart, tasteful musical that can’t compete with tackier ones. It simply fails to be tacky enough. The jazz-based score by composer Jason Howland and lyricist Nathan Tysen (Paradise Square) ventures into funk, Disney princess ballad, and a touch of Britpop. Despite the eclecticism of the musical palette, none of the songs stick in the ear, despite strenuous vocalizing by Jeremy Jordan (Newsies) and Eva Noblezada (Hadestown). These attractive Broadway vets portray, respectively, nouveau riche mystery man Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, the girl he loved, who cravenly married the old-money domestic abuser Tom (John Zdrojeski, out-acting everyone on stage). The story—you will know from reading the book or seeing other versions—is narrated by Nick Carraway (Noah J. Ricketts), Daisy’s cousin and Gatsby’s neighbor. Like Gatsby, a veteran of World War I, Nick has a front-row seat to a Jazz-Age New York soaked in bootlegger booze, cynicism, and infidelity.

Noah J. Ricketts, Sara Chase, and John Zdrojeski in The Great Gatsby. Evan Zimmerman

Adapting the novel for a medium dependent on action and plot, there’s a danger in lifting Gatsby out of the ironic and melancholy filter of Nick’s voice. Ricketts may quote lines from the book at the beginning and end of the show, but for the most part we’re left with raw story elements, and they start to resemble a melodramatic parade of morose, wealthy people cheating on each other and secondary (working-class) characters paying for it. Gatsby manipulates Nick into setting up an affair between him and Daisy; Tom looks down his nose at Gatsby, even as he conducts a sordid affair with Myrtle (Sara Chase), the blowzy wife of Wilson (Paul Whitty) a gas-station owner on Long Island. Wilson is mixed up with the bootlegging operations of Gatsby and gangster Meyer Wolfsheim (Eric Anderson) and suffers from a bad conscience. All this seedy stuff goes down much smoother stirred into a cocktail with Fitzgerald’s velvety prose.

The burden is on songs to make us care about the protagonists’ inner lives and struggles. But the numbers are so generic, the lyrics so interchangeable, they add little meat to the characters’ bones, simply reinforcing Gatsby as a self-deluded romantic and Daisy as a woman frustrated with the gender limitations of her time. The b-plot involving Nick’s romance with spunky golfer Jordan Baker (Samantha Pauly) gives off comic sparks but goes nowhere when Nick realizes that Jordan is just as selfish and immoral as the rest of her circle. That arc follows the novel, but makes you wish book writer Kait Kerrigan had taken more liberties with the material than simply condensing plot and virtue signaling about the sexism of the times. She excises Tom Buchanan’s odious racism (which even the book mocks) and glosses over the late-revealed story of how James Gatz reinvented himself as Jay Gatsby—the story Nick learns after the great one’s death—which would have made a touching song. Instead, a chorus of gyrating flappers and jazz daddies slink back on to gloat over his death: “Look how he tricked ’em / Now he’s a victim / Well, at least he made a splash / New Money!”

Noah J. Ricketts and Samantha Pauly in The Great Gatsby. Matthew Murphy

Everyone wants to profit off Gatsby. The novel passed into public domain in 2021; there are bound to be more adaptations, hopefully bolder ones. It’s worth looking to the past for clues. The theater troupe Elevator Repair Service unlocked the classic by performing every word in a seven-hour reading/séance called Gatz. In the exact opposite direction, filmmaker Baz Luhrmann deployed movie stars and hyperkinetic camera work to evoke a fever-dream exaltation of the text. Both versions are infinitely more intelligent and engaging than what’s on at the Broadway Theatre. We await word about another musical take with tunes co-written by Florence Welch trying out in Boston next month.

Who knows how long this busy yet unfocused Marc Bruni staging can survive in a highly competitive, largely lackluster season. Providing distraction from tepid songs and plodding lyrics there’s eye candy in Paul Tate de Poo III’s gilded sets and copious video projections, and Linda Cho’s glittery costumes. A couple of prop antique cars roll center stage in freshly waxed glory, promising a joy ride that never comes. Those looking for escapism in an oversaturated and underwhelming spring, be warned: The Great Gatsby gets as much mileage as the yellow Rolls-Royce. Flashy body, no engine.

The Great Gatsby | 2hrs 30mins. One intermission. | Broadway Theatre | 1681 Broadway | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here

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David Cote

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April 30, 2024
Review: Steve Carell Is a Lovable Loser in a Fragmentary ‘Uncle Vanya ‘

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Steve Carell and Alison Pill in Uncle Vanya. Marc J. Franklin

It’s Chekhov 101 to say his characters inhabit separate worlds that rarely converge. All those rueful doctors, vain landowners, stoic laborers, and pretentious artists jabber across the samovar without really connecting or changing. Sure, they level pistols at each other (and themselves) or profess undying love, but such flashes of passion smack of solipsistic play-acting. Therein lies the comedy dusted with melancholy. Still, if Chekhov’s people are not in the same play, you hope the actors inhabiting them will be. Such is not really the case in Lincoln Center Theater’s starry but arid Uncle Vanya, staged with noncommittal chill by Lila Neugebauer.

Mimi Lien’s scenic design bluntly underscores the sense that these “Russians” (scare quotes because they’re vaguely Americanized) are planets whose orbital paths do not intersect. Her set pieces crouch at the edges of the Vivian Beaumont’s broad stage, emphasizing psychic distance by maximizing negative space. The first two acts have a backyard, cottagecore vibe—picnic table, folding chairs, bench, and a huge black-and-white photograph of birch trees covering the back wall. (All very wood-ish.) The second act brings us inside the home of agricultural manager Vanya (Steve Carell) and his niece Sonya (Alison Pill), but the tasteful, midcentury decor seems equally repelled to the periphery.

The cast of Lincoln Center Theater’s Uncle Vanya. Marc J. Franklin

If the furniture is having an existential crisis, so are the depressed folks perched on it. Vanya is a middle-aged crank who sacrificed love and happiness for duty, drudging for decades on a farm and funneling money to Alexander (Alfred Molina), a pompous fraud of an art professor. Alexander was married to Vanya’s deceased sister, and the homely, naïve Sonya is the product of that union. Elena (Anika Noni Rose), Alexander’s much younger second wife, is an exquisitely bored nymph after whom Vanya lusts—as does family friend Astrov (William Jackson Harper), a local doctor who moonlights in environmentalism and binge drinking. Oh, almost forgot: Sonya loves Astrov, Vanya hates Alexander, and there’s a non-speaking local youth (Spencer Donovan Jones) who casts sad, smoldering looks at Sonya. The last element is an invention by Neugebauer, yet another iteration of unrequited love in this matryoshka of misery.

Uncle Vanya (a new take comes along every few years) is not exactly breakfast—as in, you have to work hard to screw it up—but its performers usually have solid support. Once they’ve polished their patronymics, they can settle into pathos-rich comedy tinged with Chekhov’s prophetic sense that pre-revolutionary Russia was about to crater under the idle protagonists’ feet. One of his signature tricks is musing about the generations to come. “People who are alive a hundred—two hundred years from now,” cynic-idealist Astrov wonders, “what will they think of us? Will they remember us with kindness?” Similar to the way that Shakespeare articulated unseen and unseeable inner life (Hamlet’s inky cloak), Chekhov cultivated anxious futurity in his restless people. Perhaps he was asking himself: Will my extremely specific Slavic material be relevant a century down the road?

William Jackson Harper in Uncle Vanya. Marc J. Franklin

The answer is yes, of course. Unless you’re allergic to Dr. Anton’s blend of bleakness and whimsy, the physician-playwright still grabs us with his clinical yet sympathetic dissection of human frailty. So, what are Neugebauer, her design team (including Kaye Voyce on costumes and Lap Chi Chu and Elizabeth Harper on lights), and an A-list ensemble doing to keep us focused on Vanya’s angsty journey from surly bitterness to…well, catatonic despair? The current version by the formidable Heidi Schreck (What the Constitution Means to Me) doesn’t attempt anything too radical. The language is more or less vernacular American with a light dusting of profanity (three shits, a fuck, a few hells and craps). Despite the modern clothing and furnishings, there are no smartphones or laptops in sight. When I first heard that Schreck was translating, I had this nutty hope she might flip the gender of the title figure. Gimmicky? Yep. But it would be something.

That is, something more than an efficient but lukewarm modern-dress Vanya with fine actors who never quite gel. I’d see Harper (Primary Trust) in anything; he’s a sui generis compound of tetchiness, insecurity and warmth, but I didn’t particularly buy his friendship with Vanya or even his status as doctor. By the third act he has traded hospital scrubs for paint-spattered leisurewear, and you wonder if Astrov’s gone on sabbatical to improve his stippling and brushwork. Carell is the celebrity draw, of course, and it’s neat to see him modulate his movie-star shtick—bashful-teen-trapped-in-middle-aged-dude’s-body—to something rawer and more anguished. For Vanya’s hysterical third-act meltdown, bewailing years of waste, Carell leaps on the kitchen table and crawls across it, screaming at Molina like a plump tabby cat having its midlife crisis.

Others onstage seem either miscast (Rose) or under-directed (Molina), but Pill proves to be the evening’s MVP with a painfully yearning Sonya. The gawky spinster-in-training is red meat for young actors, and Pill radiates nervy panic from every pore. Pale and reedy, she scrunches her face into a rictus of pain, yet never tips into overacting. Rendered in English, some of Chekhov’s pet descriptors (not just in Vanya) are “weird,” “strange,” “stupid” and their variants. To be human is to be a freak, and Pill embodies that brokenness with a palpable heat I wish could have ignited everything around her.

Uncle Vanya | 2hrs 30mins. One intermission. | Vivian Beaumont Theater | 150 W. 65th Street | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here

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David Cote

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April 26, 2024
Theater Review: Broadway’s ‘The Notebook’ Is Shallow, Boring and Slow

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Joy Woods and Ryan Vasquez as ‘Middle Allie’ and ‘Middle Noah’ in ‘The Notebook’ on Broadway. Copyright 2024 Julieta Cervantes

The Notebook | 2hrs 20mins. One intermission. | Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre | 236 West 45th Street | (212) 239-6200

Why are Broadway musicals suddenly so lousy? Many reasons, I can safely assume: geniuses die, leaving a hole in history with no one to replace them; teams of amateur hacks are everywhere, filling gaps once occupied by Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, Lerner and Loewe, and Comden and Green; considering the garbage they listen to every day, it’s no wonder wanna-be songwriters couldn’t write a memorable melody or an intelligent lyric line with a gun to their heads; clueless producers with no taste plunk down plenty of money to finance projects without a hope in hell of commercial success. Nobody has written a classic musical score with any originality and style since the death of Stephen Sondheim.

After his lovely and haunting Light in the Piazza, I had high hopes for Adam Guettel, but this season’s flop, The Days of Wine and Roses, proves the rumor that he spends every waking moment thinking of ways to avoid any comparison to his illustrious grandfather, the one and only Richard Rodgers. So what we’re getting instead of fresh, original musicals is increasingly forgettable carbons of old movies. The newest disappointments are The Notebook and Water for Elephants, a pair of gooey, predictable and temporary tearjerkers based on two of those corny romance novels cut from the same fabric as The Bridges of Madison County that teenagers drag to the beach with a nickel pack of Kleenex.

More about Water for Elephants next week, but first The Notebook, saccharine fiction by Nicholas Sparks that found its way into an inevitable 2004 movie that shamelessly poured on more schmaltz as it chronicled events in the labored story of Allie and Noah, a pair of lovers who survive endless pitfalls for five decades and still love each other long after mutual devotion has been invaded by personal tragedy. The movie tells the story of their saga through the eyes of two separate versions of Allie and Noah, who are of different ages. The device was annoying, but I remember enjoying it anyway. With older Allie and Noah played by ravishing Gena Rowlands and charming James Garner, and younger Allie and Noah played by beautiful Rachel McAdams and handsome newcomer Ryan Gosling before he became a Ken doll, what’s not to like?

Maryann Plunkett (left), Joy Woods (center) and Jordan Tyson (right) as Allie in ‘The Notebook’ on Broadway. Copyright 2024 Julieta Cervantes

The choppy, overwrought new Broadway production turns Allie and Noah into three couples instead of two, and every time they waft in and out of each other’s story, their races change along with their genders. The old Allie is now an elderly blonde in a nursing home suffering from dementia, and the old Noah, who seems years her senior, is black. She doesn’t know if he’s the janitor or a fellow patient, but one thing she never suspects is that he’s been her husband for 54 years. Cut to two periods in their youth, and the two Allies are suddenly black, and their Noahs are white. They all sing loud, which is not the same thing as good, but to no effect because the score is so forgettable that the songs seem to be inserted for the sole purpose of dragging out the running time. To make everything doubly confusing, old Allie doesn’t know who anyone is, including herself. From the baffled comments overheard during intermission, the audience didn’t seem to know, either. It is doubtful that half the audience knew all those people they were watching were playing the same two characters.

Before Noah can rehabilitate Allie and bring her back to normal, he has a stroke and now there are two lovers in terminal danger. No mention is made of the interracial pairings, so it is unfair to dwell on that aspect of the confusion, but when all six Allies and Noahs sing together, chaos reigns. What worked on the screen in a lugubrious, long-winded way doesn’t work on the stage at all. Both Ingrid Michaelson, who penned the boring, surface-deep songs, and Bekah Brunstetter, who wrote the shallow, sentimental book, are making their Broadway debuts, and the lack of experience shows. The badly needed element of poignancy to add depth to cardboard characters is nowhere in sight.

The cast of ‘The Notebook’ on Broadway. Copyright 2024 Julieta Cervantes

This a shame because Maryann Plunkett and Dorian Harewood, who play Older Allie and Older Noah, are engaging pros who deserve a better showcase. I was especially excited to see Harewood in a leading role that guaranteed Broadway stardom at last. I once shared the stage with him in one of those all-star AIDS benefits in Hollywood that showcased the historic songs of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe and he sang a heartbreaking arrangement of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” and “Gigi” I have never forgotten. I thought the stardom that had unfairly eluded him in the past would finally happen at last when he co-starred in the 1974 Broadway musical Miss Moffat, the musical version of The Corn is Green, starring the one and only Bette Davis. Alas, it closed in previews.

Now, here he is, at last, excellent as always but woefully denied any kind of show-stopping number you could confidently call memorable. This is the fate of the entire cast, unexceptionally choreographed by Katie Spelman and directed with mediocrity (there’s that over-riding keyword again) by Schele Williams, both of whom are also making their soggy Broadway debuts. Michael Greif, curiously listed as a second director for reasons known only to the producers, has done fine work elsewhere, but in The Notebook, he doesn’t appear to do much more than move the actors from one dark part of a room into the next, like furniture.

The result is a shallow, boring and totally irresolute The Notebook that crawls at a snail’s pace.

Buy Tickets Here

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Rex Reed

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March 19, 2024
Review: A Priest and a Nun Walk into a War in Contemporary Classic ‘Doubt’

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Amy Ryan, Zoe Kazan, Liev Schreiber in Roundabout Theatre Company’s new Broadway production of Doubt. Joan Marcus

Doubt | 1hr 30mins. No intermission. | Todd Haimes Theatre | 227 West 42nd Street | 212-719-1300

“Credo quia absurdum,” goes a declaration derived from early Christian apologist Tertullian: “I believe because it is absurd.” The more outlandish the claim the tighter one’s fingers curl around the rosary beads. Faith should negate the need for evidence or trial; proof of the divine would, paradoxically, diminish faith and lead believers into heresy. One might even argue that miracles are cheating (likewise theology, the pseudo-science of the imaginary). That terrible gap between inner conviction and outward facticity is a fiery chasm running down the middle of Doubt, currently in an impressive revival at the Roundabout.

What gives John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 “parable” its dramatic charge is how very un-absurd the crime that Sister Aloysius (Amy Ryan) suspects Father Flynn (Liev Schreiber) has committed: grooming a boy. It’s 1964 and Donald Muller is the first Black student at the Bronx Catholic school she runs. Aloysius knows all too well what the world has come to realize: the Church protects its predators, who are legion. When guileless young Sister James (Zoe Kazan) reports to Aloysius that Donald returned to class after a private meeting with Flynn behaving oddly and with alcohol on his breath, we, like Aloysius, assume the worst.

Liev Schreiber and Zoe Kazan in Doubt. Joan Marcus

Who is Father Flynn? An avatar of Vatican II’s welcoming embrace of modernity who keeps his nails a bit long and believes children need love, not ruthless discipline—as Aloysius would have it. Shanley gives Flynn the first word in a stirring sermon on the subject of, yes, doubt. How uncertainty in our most trying times may be torture, but also connects us as humans—all of us stumbling in darkness. Dogmatism is dehumanizing. In Schreiber’s physically imposing but strangely soothing presence, you soon forget that he’s about twenty years too old for Flynn (who’s in his late thirties) and simply marvel when this magnetic stage animal furrows his brow or shifts his weight from left to right, sending ripples of tension across a room. Schreiber is an actor of tremendous economy and focus, a marked contrast to the 2004 Flynn (the more boyish and vulnerable Brían F. O’Byrne); he’s unnervingly seductive, manly, authoritative. The pleasure lies in watching that pugilist bulk bowed under Aloysius’ sustained assault.

If Schreiber presents a more menacing Flynn, Ryan does something opposite. Twenty years ago, Cherry Jones’s Aloysius was a monolith of frosty glares, curt retorts and sheer willpower. She was one tough nun on a moral crusade. Indeed, Aloysius is an open invitation for any actress to play a bonneted dragon lady, impregnable to softer emotions. Ryan modulates her portrayal with little touches of sweetness and hesitancy that Jones avoided. This is a more traditionally feminine portrayal, even if Ryan’s armor grows thicker as her path to justice twists and dips. Ryan’s shading pays off, however, in the sickening swerve of a finale, in which Aloysius realizes her victory may have paved the way for more wrongdoing. Confessing uncertainty, she crumbles, sobbing, into James’s arms (Jones was more restrained).

Amy Ryan and Quincy Tyler Bernstine in Doubt. CREDIT: Joan Marcus, 2024

Not only is Doubt in the top ten American dramas of this century, but Sister Aloysius is one of the greatest stage characters in decades. From her pinched lips Shanley issues forth a series of chiseled, moralizing epigrams—Wilde by way of Savonarola. “Satisfaction is vice,” she informs the timorous James. “Innocence is a form of laziness.” “When you take a step to address wrongdoing, you are taking a step away from God, but in His service.” When James recoils from the thought of confronting Flynn on his suspected perversions, Aloysius assumes the haughty tones of a Holmes correcting a squeamish Watson: “Do not indulge yourself in witless adolescent scruples. I assure you I would prefer a more seasoned confederate. But you are the one who came to me.”

Scott Ellis’s faithful (excuse the term) and beautifully designed revival is the inaugural production at the Roundabout’s rechristened Todd Haimes Theatre, named after the late, long-serving artistic director. One of Haimes’s legacies was the casting of first (or second) tier TV and movie celebrities, a policy that might have brought in audiences but wasn’t always best for the art. (Originally, Tyne Daly was cast as Aloysius, but had to leave for medical reasons.) I’m happy to say that the casting here is mostly spot on (Kazan lays on the awkward geek-girl shtick a bit thick). She only gets one scene, but the wry, incisive Quincy Tyler Bernstine is achingly effective as Donald’s long-suffering mother, determined her son will get to high school and escape the abusive household.

Chronologically smack in the middle of his career (thus far) Doubt is Shanley’s finest work, a modern fable that’s less concerned with sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, per se, than the mental prisons that render us both inmate and warden. An expert design team reinforces this carceral motif: David Rockwell’s glowering, Gothic Revival architecture, Kenneth Posner’s dance of autumnal light and shadow, the ominous croaking of crows in Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound, and Linda Cho’s drab but textured habits and vestments. Classically balanced, fiendishly focused, lean and eloquent, the play keeps you guessing until that shocking ending—and still withholds the truth.

Also unexpected, from Shanley: Doubt is not an urban love story or whimsical mediation on the courtship rituals of men and women. Let me qualify that last point. Doubt is very much about female agency in a male-dominated institution, and how, while trying to fight an injustice you know is real, you may perpetuate evil. It would be absurd if it weren’t so tragic.

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David Cote

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March 7, 2024